Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps

The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you're dealing with.

In a push for better perspective, a group of information scientists in 2005 created a decade-long competitive art exhibit called Places & Spaces: Mapping Science. From artistic pop-culture plots to illustrations of the state of scientific collaboration (above), the founders hope winning entries inspire researchers to present their troves of data in clever and digestible ways.

"Good science maps give you a holistic understanding of how the data is structured," said information scientist Katy Börner of Indiana University, a founder and curator of the exhibit. She is also author of the Atlas of Science, a collection of the maps gathered over the years. "You don't just have to use maps to find your way home. They can be ways to get global overviews on topics."

The exhibit's advisory board follows a theme and some core criteria to pick 10 winners each year. This year's winning entries for the theme "science maps as visual interfaces to digital libraries" were announced this week. Exhibit-ready versions of the maps are scheduled for display in mid-June.

We showcase some of our favorite winners here, in addition to a few that didn't make the final cut. Some maps are too small to properly appreciate here, but we include links to high-resolution versions for each of them.

Each arc represents a collaboration between scientists in different cities mined from studies, books and trade journals found in Elsevier's Scopus database. Dense nodes of science emerge in the Americas, Europe and Japan.

Science's Genealogy

About 39,000,000 papers were published in scientific journals between 1817 and 2010. To map the explosion of research, technology analyst M'hamed el Aisati graphed unique publications based on information in Elsevier’s Scopus database.

Although the map was not a winner, it’s among our favorites. Aisati hopes to show journal pedigrees, as well as the rise and fall of specific scientific fields, in future iterations.

Wikipedia vs. the Universal Decimal Classification

The structural differences between public categories in Wikipedia and academic ones in the Universal Decimal Classification, a formal library system, stand out sharply in this map.

"We would like to scrutinize the question of how do knowledge maps differ when they are created socially (i.e. Wikipedia) as opposed to when they are created formally (UDC) using classification theory," the authors wrote in their exhibit-winning entry.

Internet in a Desk

Paul Otlet, a Belgian visionary who lived from 1868 to 1944, is often credited with anticipating an internet for the spread of knowledge. To create an internet-like learning environment before computers existed, he designed a one-person productivity station called the Mondothèque.

It was to harbor drawers brimming with reference books, microfilm and bibliographic cards. He also imagined radio, television and camera equipment at arm's length on the desk.

C. van den Heuvel, "Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective: the designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for telecommunication and machine readable documentation to organize research and society," Knowledge Organization, 36 (2009): 214-226.

Metadata for Architectural Exploration

To make all of Europe's architectural data easier to access, a community of users created the winning classification tree above, titled Metadata for Architectural Content in Europe.

The interactive version on the project's website allows users to search through a web of architectural vocabulary. Once a phrase is selected, relevant websites appear below to guide productive exploration.